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Why Yell.com makes me want to SCREAM!14th June 2009 The Internet is a powerful marketing tool in our technological age… or that’s what they tell you. So like many small businesses I decided that I to could not live without a presence on the world wide web. Looking for a plumber in Eastbourne? go to yell.com, after all it’s your Yellow Pages on line… sounds good so far. Enter Plumber and Eastbourne and hey presto! So after parting with £460 I am led to believe that my listing will be ‘randomised’ and share an equal opportunity to appear on the first page. Spending several thousand pounds to be permanently listed on the front page is out of the question for all ‘local’ plumbers and is the preserve of the mighty 'Nationals' (quite irrelevant when you need someone local, but that’s another story!). So what now? Sit back and let the business roll in. Well, one enquiry in six weeks anyway. So, it’s not exactly living up to its expectations and a call to yell.com persuades me that it’s early days and to leave it a bit longer. A few weeks later and still no joy, so I’m naturally disappointed and am now phoning to cancel my advert and asking to switch my money from yell.com into yellow pages… “oh no, certainly not, can’t do that!” “So what can you do?” “Ahh, there is something, for the small sum of £500 we can prioritise your listing so that it appears more often on the front page!” “But I thought that we were all on an equal playing field and that this was done by randomising appearances, not paying to be prioritised!” Well, at this stage I’m very upset and want to speak to customer services, so it’s to them I write… A few days later I get a call but it’s not what I want to hear. “Your advert went live on the 7th April but we changed our rules and introduced the pay to prioritise the day before”. “So surely I’ve got a right to be upset if the goal posts have been changed”. “Well no Sir, we can’t guarantee a response to your advert and we can change things when ever we want to…have a look in our terms & conditions”. “But I booked the advert on the 30th March so surely I should have been told of the changes as it is unlikely that I would have gone ahead…” On and on, round and round, and we are back to the beginning. Yell.com can do what they want, move the goal posts, decrease the response and increase the price and that’s just tough for little old me. Customer Services (joke) are not sympathetic in any way, or prepared to compromise at all, or even to make any helpful suggestions that will treat me like a valued customer. It’s clear that I’m not, but it was nice to have my money anyway...thanks yell.com! So dear Sir, or Madam, I just wonder if there is anything that you can do for a poor downtrodden old Plumber (although perhaps more loathed than an Estate Agent) to see if you can bring the might of the press to bear on a big company who has lost sight of it’s duty to do business ethically and who has forgotten that the ‘customer’ is still important to them. Yours,
Adrian Beal - a dissatisfied yell.com customer |